Tesseseya

I invented the original version of Tesseseya over the February 12-15, 2016, weekend. This project grew out of the remains of my failed project Sodemadu.

I started inventing Tesseseya with a text derived from an Australian Aboriginal fable taken from Aboriginal Myths, Legends, and Fables by A. W. Reed. Reed admits in the introduction to retelling stories collected from various Aboriginal tribes and conflating similar stories, so I cannot say where the original fable came from. However, I then adapted it further and changed it around a bit to make the story of Nuvu, and published it in fiatlingua. For the current version of Tesseseya, presented here, I added more stories, changed some of the phonology, and refined the grammar.

Tesseseya's word order is Subject - Verb - Object (SVO). The subject can be a pronominal proclitic attached to the verb. Subjects are generally only stated in full the first time they are referenced. After that, a pronominal proclitic on the verb generally suffices. Sometimes a determiner plus classifier used as a pronoun is stated as the subject when the subject would otherwise be unclear.

Tesseseya is a mostly agglutinating language, where most of the closed class words are clitics that cannot stand alone. Clitics exist in the continuum between affixes and full words. Tessesseya's clitics vary in where they belong in that continuum. Between the agglutination and the clitics, words, especially verbs, can become very long very quickly.